How to Create a Law Firm Content Marketing Strategy
Content is king, and nothing has changed in that respect.
Producing content to rise up Google’s rankings and provide valuable information to your target audience is as old as the Internet itself. Today,73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C have a content marketing strategy, and for a good reason. It works.
Content marketing is a core pillar of successful SEO, and the legal industry is no exception. But, like any form of marketing, you need a strategy, so here’s what you need to know about building one for your law firm.
What is content marketing for law firms?
As an art form, content marketing is a broad topic. Beginners often get confused about what it means and why they’re doing it. This is because content marketing as a concept can apply to various types of initiatives.
All forms of content have one goal: to share valuable content.
The point is not what type of content you have, but what type resonates with your audience. Getting this right opens up a whole new world of possibilities, with96% of decision-makers saying that content marketing has been effective for their brands.
Should law firms invest in content marketing?
If you value gaining new clients via the online realm, content marketing is essential to getting seen. Your website might act as your virtual business card, but valuable digital assets offer a chance for prospective clients to engage with your brand.
Content marketing is a powerful channel for growing your practice when done correctly. Some of the reasons to invest in content marketing include:
Nailing your strategy can help expand your audience.
Content alone can nurture leads without picking up the phone.
Ultimately, the legal industry can benefit from content marketing as much as any other niche in the overarching economy. Today,77% of lawyers use social media as a tool, so it’s a natural next step to add content marketing.
Does content marketing actually work for the legal industry?
Think that content marketing doesn’t work for legal practices? Think again.
It makes sense economically, and the results speak for themselves. If you’re still unsure whether it works for local solicitors, remember that SEO is universally important. Without content, you stand little chance of seeing any SEO progress.
What should a content strategy for a law firm include?
Writing a blog or shooting a video and tossing it onto your website isn’t enough to see results. Unlike Rome, building it and expecting people to come isn’t a viable strategy. Competition is too fierce, and without direction, there are no guarantees you’re even giving your audience what they want.
So, consider your strategy before thinking about what you want to create. Here’s what you should do before launching your content marketing drive:
Keyword Research– Keyword research tells you what people are searching for and what your audience is searching for. If people in Manchester are searching for a “judicial separation solicitor”, then it tells you this is a good subject to focus on, and for your area.
Competitor Research – Examine your leading competitors. What are they writing about? Which keywords are they using? How are they structuring their content? If it’s working for them, there’s a good chance it will also work for you, but you have to do it better.
Budget – Time is money. Whether you outsource or not, every piece of content takes time away from other parts of your business. Defining a content marketing budget early will help you to keep all your ducks in a row.
Content Type – Every type of content comes with its own pros and cons. Podcasts can be great for brand-building, but they also take massive amounts of time to produce and promote. Most law firms will start with basic blogs before investing in other content types.
Alignment – How will your content align with your brand? Consider matters like tone of voice, style and whether your content accurately depicts what you do.
Content Funnel – Building a content funnel is essential for turning casual readers into clients. Divide your content funnel into top, mid and bottom so that you can measure how effective your content is at converting.
These strategic aspects spell the beginning of a flourishing content marketing campaign. Every law firm will still have to endure a period of experimentation in the beginning, but once you hit on something good, you’ll be surprised at how effective content marketing can be.
Countless types of content exist. Maybe you’ve dreamed of having the number one legal podcast in the UK. Perhaps you’re looking at becoming a YouTube sensation. Regardless of how you approach content marketing, the only thing that matters is whether that content directly or indirectly results in more business.
So, what type of content is likely to work for your law firm?
Blogs
Blogs are the core pieces of content available. They’re highly effective at delivering valuable information to your audience. Ultimately, a legal blog should educate the reader.
Service Pages
Service pages are often used as landing pages in the legal industry. They tell your audience what you can do for them. They’re a place to provide a solution to a problem someone has, via your services.
Case Studies
Don’t tell people how great you are. Show them. If you were involved in a landmark case that hit the headlines, make a big deal out of it. Writing about your big wins demonstrates to potential clients that you’re a heavy-hitter they can rely on to help them deal with their legal troubles.
Explainer Videos
The law is complicated. That’s why explainer videos are so effective in the legal industry. Breaking down complex legal concepts isn’t just educational. It’s also an opportunity for you to introduce your staff and promote your brand.
Social Media
Social media is also a type of content marketing. Due to the casual nature of these platforms, it’s a chance to make your team friendlier and more approachable.
Note that these five options are all great starting points if you’re taking your first steps into content marketing. Try not to do too much at once. A little done well will accomplish far more than casting a wide net.
Best practices for law firms creating content
There’s a misconception that answering the big questions is enough to make your content marketing successful. Whether you like it or not, law firms creating content must always have SEO in mind.
Here are some of the best practices all law firms should follow when generating content.
Answer questions in your content
Only8% of search queries are questions, but even if you enter a few random words, Google will respond with question snippets. It underlines the importance of answering questions, so the easiest way to do this is by doing just that.
Sometimes, a big question may require an entire blog all to itself. On other occasions, an easy way to answer questions is to append an FAQ section to a piece of content.
Regardless, every piece of content should answer a question your audience has.
Featured snippet optimisation
Featured snippets are your shortcut to the top of Google. These are the answer boxes you see when performing certain types of searches. Approximately30.9% of featured snippets rank in position one, and 8.6% of clicks go to these snippets.
Let’s get one thing clear. There’s no way to game the featured snippets system. Google decides as to who gets the snippet. You can reduce the time it takes by hitting niche questions your competitors aren’t answering, but higher-quality content always wins the race.
Some tips include:
Phrasing a question as “What is”.
Answer a question in two to three sentences.
Use well-structured headings.
Bolding the main section of your answer.
Create a content hub
Content hubs are a curated collection of content on a specific subject. It houses all types of content and divides it into a single subject.
The value of creating separate content hubs around your specialist areas is increasing engagement. They act as series that guide your reader through several types of content.
Keeping them on your pages longer and upping your click-through rates signals to Google that you offer great content. It’s also a chance to position your legal brand as an industry authority.
Prove your EEAT
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, or EEAT, is Google’s way of fighting against low-quality content, especially AI-generated. You need to figure out how you’ll hit these four points within your content.
Here’s how to do it:
Experience – This is proof that you’re not just rewriting someone else’s content. So, in the case of a lawyer, pairing a case study with an article on that case from a local newspaper would hit this point. An author profile including your credentials, whether you wrote or proofread the article, can also help with proving experience.
Expertise – Who are you? Using your leading legal superstar as the author would also hit this point because Google will scour the web for information on that person. If they’ve won industry awards, it automatically contributes to the “Expertise” rating.
Authoritativeness – This is all about who you are but with a twist. Google will also examine your entire website to see if that authority extends throughout. Content hubs help to build up your topical authority.
Trustworthiness – A combination of the previous three. You can’t aim for this one, but consistently producing high-quality content will contribute.
SEO optimisation for all content
Hitting all of Google’s best practices for content should be considered a bare minimum for all types of content.
For example, you should include headings, neatly divided sub-sections and meta descriptions for every page. Any good SEO consultant will ensure these basic SEO components are present throughout your website.
Updating and refreshing content
Evergreen content, or content that’s as relevant today as it was five years ago, creates a flywheel that keeps people coming to your website. Many brands have less than ten pieces of content that consistently attract new business for years.
However, the legal industry is especially vulnerable to disruption because of changes in the law. You may have written a lengthy guide on data privacy laws, but one change could make all that outdated. Google also takes note of that.
Regularly updating your primary content whenever there are changes can ensure they remain high-performing pieces. This doesn’t just mean changing the information but also updating your keywords and other SEO components.
Obviously, it isn’t practical to keep doing this with all of your content, but it must be mandatory with your best-performing pages.
Let Tao Digital handle your content marketing
Content marketing is one of the key pillars of quality SEO. You handle the expertise and let us handle the content optimisation, distribution and technical SEO tweaks. With an expert SEO consultant by your side, you can ensure that every piece of content is primed for success.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising are like fishing nets, capturing potential clients as they browse the internet, pulling them towards your firm with enticing bait (keywords) and reeling them in with strategic targeting and optimisation.
SEO is like a trawl net, casting a wide radius to catch a large audience. PPC is like a gill net, used to target specific species, targeting specific audience segments for immediate results. With the right combination of SEO and PPC techniques, your firm can have a steady stream of potential clients hooked and ready to convert into loyal clients.
Want to know how SEO and PPC work together for the legal sector? Let’s dive in.
What is SEO for Law Firms?
Law firm SEO involves enhancing a law firm’s website and digital visibility to achieve a higher position in search engine results.
This consists of implementing technical, creative and analytical strategies to improve website content and site structure, acquiring reputable backlinks and targeting appropriate keywords related to your firm’s areas of expertise.
An optimised law website ranks higher on search engines like Google, allowing potential clients to find and contact your firm, ultimately leading to increased leads, conversions and revenue.
What is PPC for Law Firms?
PPC for law firms is a form of online advertising where you pay each time a potential client clicks on your ad. You’ll find PPC on search engine results pages (at the top), social media platforms and other websites.
With PPC, you target specific keywords and demographics but only pay for the clicks they receive. The ad’s quality and relevance, keyword popularity and your budget determine the cost of each click.
Why SEO and PPC is important for Law Firms
SEO is takes time to produce results with ongoing efforts needed to improve rankings. PPC provides immediate results but costs more money up front – once you stop paying, your website traffic dwindles.
SEO and PPC should be used together because when a law firm ranks highly organically and has paid ads at the top of the page, it is more likely to be seen by potential clients.
For example, a law firm specialising in divorce law can use SEO to optimise its website for keywords like “divorce solicitor” and “child custody lawyer.” It can also use PPC to target ads to reach people who have searched for these keywords on Google.
Speak to us about a SEO and PPC plans today – Let’s get more leads!
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How SEO strategies work for Law Firms
By consistently implementing these strategies, your law firm can increase its online presence and attract potential clients who are actively searching for your legal expertise:
Keyword Research: The first step in SEO is identifying relevant keywords and phrases that potential clients use to search for legal services. These keywords should be strategically incorporated into your website content, meta descriptions and image tags to improve your site’s relevance and visibility.
Content Creation: You can create blog posts, articles and other forms of content with specific keywords and structures whilst demonstrating your expertise in your practice area. You can also optimise for local search, so when a potential client types in “Child law Solicitor in Manchester,” for example, your family law website will pop up (for what area/s you operate in).
Local SEO: If you want to boost your online presence in location-based searches further, consider implementing local SEO techniques like enhancing your Google Business Profile, creating content specific to your area and gaining mentions on relevant local websites.
Mobile Optimization: Your law firm’s website should be optimised for mobile devices. This includes having a responsive design, fast loading times and mobile-friendly content. Why? Over 50% of web traffic comes from mobiles!
Link Building: When other websites link to yours, it shows that you are a trusted and authoritative source of information. This establishes credibility in your industry and boosts SERP rankings.
How PPC strategies work for Law Firms
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) strategies utilise targeted advertisements on search engines like Google and Bing, and social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
These advertisements are based on relevant keywords and phrases specific to your law firm and its services. When someone searches for a related keyword or phrase, your firm’s ad appears at the top of the search results, labelled as “sponsored content” or “ad.”
You’re charged a certain amount each time someone clicks on the ad, hence the name “pay-per-click.” PPC strategies also allow you to target specific locations, demographics and behaviours, ensuring your ads reach their desired audience.
Such a targeted approach attracts potential clients actively searching for legal services who are more likely to be interested in your specific practice areas.
Another advantage of PPC is the ability to track and analyse ad performance. These metrics help you decide which keywords and demographics drive the most traffic and conversions, allowing them to refine your strategy for maximum impact.
Can you use PPC and SEO together?
Yes, PPC and SEO can be used together as part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. These two separate tactics complete each other, ultimately driving more quality traffic and conversions to your website.
By targeting the same keywords through PPC and SEO, your business increases its chances of appearing in top positions on SERPs, augmenting clicks and conversions.
PPC and SEO data also inform each other’s strategies. For example, PPC data on keyword performance, ad headlines and other factors can help guide SEO efforts. In contrast, SEO data on keyword rankings and website traffic can inform PPC targeting and optimisation.
Does SEO or PPC have a greater ROI for Law Firms?
Generally, SEO has a higher ROI for law firms than PPC because it’s a long-term investment that generates organic traffic to your website for years to come. Once your website is out there, it is discoverable time and again.
On the other hand, PPC is expensive, especially if you’re targeting competitive keywords, and it only lasts as long as you can afford it. However, PPC is a good tactic to attract specific clients immediately.
Truthfully, it’s a bit of a trick question as you should use both unless budget is an issue, in which case you’ll want to weigh the pros and cons.
The pros and cons of SEO vs PPC for the legal sector
SEO Pros
Long-term investment: Once you start ranking for relevant keywords, you’ll continue getting traffic to your website for years, even if you stop investing in SEO.
Builds brand awareness and authority: When your website ranks well in search results, it shows potential clients that you’re a trusted expert.
SEO Cons
Takes time: Ranking for competitive keywords can take months or even years.
Complex and time-consuming: You’ll need to invest time and resources into creating high-quality content, optimising your website for search engines and building backlinks.
PPC Pros
Generates quick results: You can immediately start seeing results from your PPC campaigns.
Highly targeted: You can target your ads to specific audiences and keywords, which means you’re more likely to reach people interested in your services.
PPC Cons
PPC is expensive: The cost of PPC ads can vary depending on the competitiveness of the keywords you’re targeting – sometimes, it can cost hundreds per click.
Campaigns must be managed and optimised regularly: You need to monitor your spending and results and adjust your campaigns as needed.
How do you know whether your law firm should invest in SEO and/or PPC?
As a rule of thumb, you should invest in SEO first because its impact lasts longer, and then PPC. However, there are a few circumstantial considerations:
Your budget: SEO and PPC can be expensive, but SEO is typically a long-term investment. PPC can generate results more quickly, but you will need to continue to spend money on ads to maintain your visibility.
Goals: Do you want to increase brand awareness and generate more leads over time (SEO), or do you need immediate results (PPC)?
Competition: If several competitors already have an established online presence, it will take more time to gain traction with SEO alone. In this case, a PPC campaign momentarily levels the playing field.
Let Tao Digital take care of your SEO and PPC
Like expert fishermen skilfully select the perfect net to catch their target, our team is skilled at utilising SEO and PPC to attract potential clients to your firm. We have a case study, featured on the huge SEO platform Moz, about how we increased a Law Firm’s leads by 174%!
Don’t delay – reach out to us now and let us help you bring online success to your law firm.
Digital Marketing Tips for Law Firms
Digital marketing for law firms is one of the fastest and easiest ways for lawyers to grow their business. The more people who discover your law firm, the potential clients you will gain and the more growth your business will experience.
So, what are the best digital marketing strategies for law firms to adopt?
Do Law Firms need to invest in digital marketing?
We always suggest that legal firms invest in digital marketing due to the fact it is one of the best ways to promote their legal services and attract new clients. It is also a great way to build brand awareness and establish your firm as a trusted and reliable source.
Digital marketing for law firms includes the use of digital channels and techniques in order to get the results you want to see, whether that’s an increase in leads or higher engagement on your social platforms.
What types of digital marketing strategies are there?
There are few different types of digital marketing strategies that you can use in order to get the results you want.
Strategies such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content Marketing heavily focus on improving and optimising your website and how this can organically bring in new clients, as well as retaining old ones.
Other strategies focus more on how you can drive people from other avenues to your website. For example, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing are all great ways to get new leads from external sources to your website, not just organically from search result pages.
Can digital marketing work for the legal industry?
With the right strategy implemented, digital marketing for your law firm can help to increase website traffic, generate new leads and ultimately drive your business to be one of the top ranking sites on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
However, it is important to remember that these results won’t be instantaneous and will depend on several factors, such as:
There are several different digital strategies that can be implemented to promote your legal services:
Website Auditing and Optimisation
As a law firm, it is vital you have a formidable website to stand out against your competitors, especially since so much of your business will come from local clients. Your website serves as the foundation for most of your digital marketing efforts and it’s where you will provide key information about your services, as well as high quality blogs for your current and prospective clients.
Part of having an optimised website is ensuring that it is centred around user experience (UX). This will not only take into account the needs, values and limitations of your users, but the goals and objectives of your business. Your website should be easy to navigate, accessible to all users, useful and credible.
These values also need to be carried across to your mobile site. Some of the basics to make your site more mobile friendly include:
Making your site adaptive to any device such as mobile, laptop, tablet and so on
Always use responsive design for assets like images
Use shorter meta titles since they are easier to read on mobile
Avoid pop-ups that cover content and cause visitors to leave the site
Consider where and when long-form content is appropriate.
SEO
SEO is the process of optimising your content and your site in order to achieve higher rankings in SERPs. Ultimately, implementing an SEO strategy for your law firm will bring in the right visitors organically to drive more leads and sales.
It involves a variety of different tactics, such as:
Fixing and monitoring technical issues
Implementing core SEO features like title tags, meta descriptions and schema
Working on Core Web Vitals
Creating high-quality content
Optimising content around specific keywords
Targeting local keywords will help you to show up for relevant searches made by prospects in your area. Using these keywords will increase your visibility and the potential of attracting new clients.
Optimising individual pages can help make them easier for search engines to read, which allows you to compete with other local law firms. Optimisation includes a variety of different factors including images, text, video, schema, HTML tags and so on.
Using the above techniques will help your site to rank higher on SERPs, which in turn allows you to build brand awareness and trust from your visitors. They will be more inclined to purchase your services than they would if you didn’t have a great web presence.
Email marketing involves sending promotional and information emails to build relationships with your audience, win over prospects and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Emails can include a variety of different content from new services, promoted website content or general messages on behalf of your business.
Law firms can tap into this market by asking users to subscribe on their website, dedicating a specific webpage that asks for their email and even giving away something free, such as an ebook or a PDF, in exchange for their email address.
Emails are a great way to promote traffic to your website, as the emails you send to your subscribers should contain links to pages. A good way to determine the success of your emails is through key performance indicators, such as open-rate and click-through rate.
Compared to other marketing strategies, email marketing is usually quite cost-effective, which is great for new law firms starting up.
Social Media
Social media marketing utilises social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. You may use social media marketing techniques if you want to:
Promote your content and services
Build brand awareness and visibility
Gain more followers
Engage with current and prospective customers
Drive traffic to your website
Tap into a different audience
Using social media for marketing is a relatively low budget, but it does require ongoing advertising spending and most of the time, you will need a landing page designed specifically for users from that spend.
Social media is, however, a great place to achieve audience engagement. Choosing the right channels, doing research on how the platforms work and creating useful and interesting content is a tried and tested way for many in achieving a social presence.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is based on answering people’s questions and really helping them through the content, rather than interrupting them with promotions about your business. It can include content such as blog posts, landing pages, white papers, ebooks, case studies and much more.
In most cases, content marketing is used to:
Put content in front of prospective clients when searching
Improve brand awareness and online authority
Improve brand loyalty
Educate your target audience
Convert and keep leads
In order to do the above, a great strategy to include is by creating what is known as a “content hub”, which is a curated collection of content on a specific topic or subject. You can then fill your resource hub with a combination of informative and useful pieces of content which utilise your key terms and common industry queries.
Not only is this a great way to contend with your competitors, but it also increases your brand visibility online and therefore, generates organic traffic through your content showing up on SERPs.
Content marketing also goes hand-in-hand with SEO. This means that if you have high-quality content, it will significantly improve your website’s SEO, so you can enjoy more organic website traffic that will turn visitors into buyers.
Google Business Profile and Reviews
Google Business Profile is a section about your business that appears on the side of Google’s SERP. It will appear when someone searches for you or your business in their area.
It is essentially a brief overview of your business, including:
Your business name and address
Primary and secondary categories (the services you offer)
Photos of the team, business, service offering
Location on Google Maps
Opening hours and contact details
Website
Reviews
Having a Google Business Profile (GBP) can particularly help with local SEO. Ensuring your information is up to date and well optimised is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings.
Every business should have a GBP as it helps potential clients find your business. For example, if someone locally searches “law firms near me” into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These clients may have never found your business otherwise.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a strategy in which you pay every time a user clicks on one of your online ads. It is most commonly done through Google Ads and it is an effective way to reach people who are searching for terms related to your business. Implementing a PPC campaign will likely be used to help increase your sales or leads.
Costs can vary quite drastically, from relatively inexpensive to thousands of pounds per month, depending on the size of your campaign. When campaigns are discontinued, the traffic generated by that campaign is also discontinued.
When users click on PPC ads, they are directed to a landing page that encourages them to take a certain action. Either:
Make a purchase
Complete a form
Download a report, or something similar.
PPC campaigns are really easy to track, especially with platforms like Google Ads. You’ll be able to track how many people view your ads as well as how many click on them and what percentage of them convert.
Which digital marketing strategy is best for your law firm?
There is no single strategy that will work best for all law firms. Even within the same industry, online and search marketing strategies will need to be tailored to your individual business.
The first step in any digital marketing journey should be a website audit. These audits allow you to gain a better understanding of the position that your site is, in order to plan the most effective next steps.
By working with an SEO agency, you’ll be able to discover and discuss:
Your goals, needs and current strategy
Your competitors and the industry
How your site is currently performing
Whether your site has any issues
What digital marketing channels would work best for your firm, and why
To get started, we just need a few details about your business and chat about where you want to go. Contact the team today.
In the age of searching for services online, it is important that you find a way for your law firm business to stand out amongst the rest.
Using SEO techniques can significantly help you to outrank your competitors, increase traffic to your site and generate new leads.
How does SEO work for the legal industry?
A big issue within the legal industry is figuring out how to get your business in front of potential clients. Fortunately, SEO for your law firm can be the driving force to an increase in leads.
Although there is no foolproof method behind SEO in the legal industry, there are a variety of different ways to improve your chances of ranking on page one of a search engine.
Through the use of specific keywords, dedicated blogs and geographically based content, you are much more likely to appear in the search results when people start to look for law firms in their area. The higher your site ranks on a search results page, the more likely a user is to click on your site and use your services.
Is SEO important for solicitors?
Yes, SEO is absolutely one of the most important factors for solicitors to get their business out to new prospects. If you’re a solicitor looking to grow your business, organic search traffic may be a significant marketing channel that you’re overlooking.
Optimising your website for better visibility and rankings in search engines can increase traffic to your site, leading to higher conversion rates.
Your website is the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.
Implement keywords
Keyword research and implementation is one of the most effective ways to organically increase your leads. Keyword research involves using professional tools and strategies to discover what people are searching and how you can use this to your advantage to attract them to your site.
Your ideal keywords will range from highly searched, significant industry terms to long-tail, low searched terms that capitalise on a small audience to aid in conversion.
Keywords shouldn’t be too general, as it will become increasingly difficult to rank for them – for example, the simple term of ‘family law solicitor’ is searched 4.6k times per month in the UK (Correct on Ahrefs as of August 2023). Perhaps, instead of initially trying to rank for the term “family law solicitor”, you could aim to rank for “family law solicitors Bolton”.
Search Intent
You will also want to rank for keywords/queries whereby you understand a clear search intent behind them. These are often queries which include words and phrases such as “why”, “how” and “can I”, as people are seeking to have questions answered.
The most common search types are:
Informational
Commercial
Navigational
Transactional
This means that your on-site content must match the intent of a search. For example, if you want to talk about how your Family Law firm supports people when choosing Grounds for Divorce, you may think about creating a page to showcase this service.
However, if you analyse what’s currently ranking for key terms and searches around ‘grounds for divorce’, the results are mostly blog posts. This would suggest that the search intent is informational, and you should create articles around the main topic: ‘What are the Grounds for Divorce?’.
This will then likely break down into more questions and more niche blog posts, such as ‘What Does Irretrievable Breakdown Mean in Grounds for Divorce?’. These types of content help to increase your online authority, showcasing your firm as knowledgeable in all areas and having answers to all questions surrounding one topic.
On-Page Optimization
To fully optimise your content for keywords it’s important, that they are used in the following areas on a page:
Title tag
Meta Description tag
Heading 1 and subheadings
Throughout the blog content (where relevant – never keyword stuff)
More often than not, the URL
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can make or break your law firm’s SEO performance, making it a major factor to your success.
In basic terms, technical SEO is how “google-friendly” your website is, which in turn means ‘user-friendly’ as Google prioritises users first. Since this can get very complicated, it’s best to consult an SEO agency who specialises in law firm SEO. However, there are some things you can keep in mind with technical SEO.
Make sure your website is user friendly
There are two basics to ensure your site is user friendly:
Pages load fast, ideally under 2.5 seconds
Pages render well across screens, for both desktops and mobile
One of the quickest ways to reduce page load times is using a better hosting provider, we recommend Kinsta as they’re just the best there is. We’ve written a full review that you can read here, Kinsta Hosting Review
Make sure your site is easy to navigate
It’s important that your website has simple and easy to navigate menus and links, so users can easily find all of your pages and understand what each page is about.
Google is quite transparent about things you can do to improve your law firm’s technical SEO, and you can familiarise yourself by viewing the Webmaster Guidelines (now called Google Search Essentials).
Backlink and off-page citations
Having great content and a Google friendly site is one thing, but having backlinks and off-page citations can help to boost your presence even more.
For SEO, backlinks work somewhat like a popularity contest. If a law firm website gets a lot of backlinks from other high profile sites, they essentially receive backing that the content on their site is correct and reliable.
Increase local SEO through off-page citations
The contact information of your law firm shows up in all kinds of places online, making it both visible to search engines and potential clients. That’s why the best way to gain more visibility from local SEO is to obtain backlinks from places where your business is displayed.
Some examples of where you can get off-page citations to improve your local SEO include:
Legal directories
Local directories, including your Google Business profile
Social profiles
Reviews and endorsement websites
Collect positive client reviews
Part of a successful law firm SEO strategy is generating more positive reviews. These reviews show users that your law firm can be trusted and will provide high-quality services.
If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, this may lead you to outrank them. As well as this, users will be more likely to choose your firm over others which have little to no reviews.
There are many easy ways in which you can increase your positive reviews. This could be by using a new review platform that offers more support than just Google reviews, or you could utilise email marketing to encourage new and existing clients in your database to leave reviews.
What benefits will SEO have for law firms?
The benefits of SEO for law firms are huge. Beyond increasing a law firm’s ranking on a search result page, SEO works to bring in more traffic which is likely to convert to leads.
Other benefits of SEO for law firms include:
Outranking local competition
Generating new traffic
Collecting more client reviews
Solidifying their law firm as a reputable authority
SEO is a long term strategy, and it needs time to work. Many Law Firms struggle with in-house capacity for well-researched and search-focused content production, local SEO implementation, technical SEO maintenance and an ongoing link strategy.
Consulting with an SEO agency for one or all of the above allows you to focus on your internal goals and keeping clients satisfied. Consistent investment and trust in SEO allows leads to flow in at the pace you want.
Regularly reviewing your search engine optimisation (SEO) plans will help you to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines. Running an SEO audit is an essential part of keeping your SEO strategy up to date, which will eventually increase the traffic to your website.
What is an SEO audit for a website?
An SEO Audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or faults that will have an impact on your site’s organic performance. These errors can potentially prevent your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google and Bing.
What kinds of websites need an SEO audit?
All websites can benefit from an SEO audit due to the fact that it provides vital insights into your website, identifying areas which need improvement so you can rank better in organic search results.
Search engines and algorithms can change on a regular basis, so it’s always good practice to review your website regularly and determine how those changes have impacted your site.
7 reasons why your site needs an SEO audit
Monitoring your competition
Having an understanding of your competition is always important for your business, especially if they are ranking above you on search engines.
SEO audits are a great way to obtain insights into your competitors’ websites, including their strengths and weaknesses. You can get insights on their rankings, determining what keywords they’re using and which specific ones they’re ranking for.
From here, you can see if it’s possible to implement the same keywords into your own SEO strategy.
You can also focus on the keywords that aren’t ranking well for your competitor and boost your rankings for these instead.
Keywords
Continuing with keywords, they are one of the best ways to see if your SEO strategy is working. Regular SEO audits will provide you with insights about your websites overall performance, and you can particularly focus on what keywords you rank for and how you rank for them.
Using SEO analysis, you can regularly update your website based on the performance of your keyword rankings and assess the progress of those updates.
Mobile optimisation and website loading time
Google uses mobile-first indexing on all of its websites, meaning that the mobile version of your site is reviewed first before your desktop site. Google then ranks your site based on how well your site performs on mobile devices. When it comes to your site’s loading time, Google also ranks based on a fast loading time.
An SEO Audit allows you to uncover these issues, allowing you to change elements of your site to ensure you have a faster loading time and a more mobile friendly site.
Broken pages
Conducting an SEO Audit allows you to diagnose the status of your website. You will be able to see if you have any broken links, redirects or any pages that cannot be found. It will also showcase any issues that are reducing your site’s traffic.
These problems can quickly be identified and resolved with an SEO audit.
Website traffic insights
With a full, in-depth SEO audit using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can find out about your search volume, clicks and impressions that your site is generating on search pages.
An increase in clicks and impressions is always a good sign that your SEO strategy is working. Just be sure to regularly monitor this data so you can be aware of any changes in traffic.
Identify on-page issues
On-page SEO refers to any optimisation of a website content and structure to improve its rankings on search engine results pages. On-page SEO aims to make it as easy as possible for crawling bots to understand what a website is about and index the content accordingly.
Using an SEO audit for on-page issues allows you to check for errors in meta titles and descriptions, headers, content and internal linking. These are annoying problems that you may not notice without the help of an SEO audit.
Helps you build a content strategy
An SEO audit can help you better understand your website’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of your competitors. Using this information, you can develop a content strategy that is more effective and will help you achieve high rankings.
SEO audits can also help you identify opportunities to create unique content that will attract backlinks and improve your site’s overall authority.
What Does an SEO Audit Include?
An SEO audit is vital for finding opportunities to improve a site’s search performance and overall page rankings. It involves finding on-page, technical, content and link related issues that need to be fixed or improved.
While each SEO audit may vary from each other, there are basic issues that site owners should always look for.
What should an SEO audit cover?
An SEO audit is the process of assessing how well your site is optimised for search engines, such as Google and Bing. The process outlines and analises potential problems or errors that will most likely impact organic performance.
There are a few key parts that an SEO audit should cover, including:
Checking your site for on-page SEO issues
Analysing the strength of current on-site, off-site and core technical elements
Ensuring your site is being crawled correctly, indexed and rendered by Google
Verifying that your site has good UX design (user experience)
Elements of technical SEO in an audit
A technical SEO audit examines various technical aspects of a website, ensuring they are following the best search operation practices. Technical audits are simply just a type of SEO audit, but they focus on issues related to your website that happen behind the scenes.
Elements of a technical SEO audit include:
Identifying crawl errors with a crawl report
Checking a sites load time
Ensuring a site is mobile friendly
Optimising titles and metadata
Checking images for accurate descriptions and ALT-text
What does an SEO audit include?
SEO audits can vary slightly from one another, but each one should analyse the basic technical SEO elements like server errors and metadata. However, every SEO audit should include technical and on-page audits.
While each SEO audit process can differ since there is no universal approach, there are a handful of basic issues that you should be looking for.
We’ve outlined below the essential features of SEO audits that you should be including in your checklist.
Check for manual actions: Manual actions are when a human reviewer at Google has determined that your site doesn’t comply with their webmaster guidelines. The result of this is that some or all of your site won’t be shown in Google’s search results.
You are unlikely to have manual actions unless you’ve done something seriously wrong. However, it should still be the first thing you check because if you have one, you’ll be stuck before you even start.
Check organic traffic: Google updates its search algorithms all the time, meaning it’s important to check organic traffic drops coinciding with the updates.
Check for HTTPS-related issues: HTTPS is a secure protocol for transferring data to and from visitors. You should be checking each page on your site using HTTPS by visiting them and ensuring there is a lock icon on the address bar.
Check indexability issues: Google search results come from its index, which is a database of web pages. Your pages need to be indexed to stand any chance at ranking.
Check for mobile-friendliness: Mobile-friendliness has been a huge ranking factor everywhere since Google moved to mobile-first indexing in 2019.
Check page speed: Page speed has been a small ranking factor on desktop since 2010 and mobile since 2018.
Check for broken pages: Having broken pages on your site is never good, and if these pages have backlinks, they are effectively being wasted because they point to nothing.
Check for sitemap issues: A sitemap lists the pages that you want search engines to index. It shouldn’t list things like redirects, non-canonicals or dead pages, as those send mixed signals to Google.
Check for declining content: Rankings will rarely last forever since content can become outdated, meaning the search traffic will often start to drop off. You can solve this by updating and republishing old content.
Check for content gaps: Content gaps occur when you miss important subtopics in your content. Not including this content means you won’t rank for as many long-tail keywords and potentially won’t rank as high as you could for your main target keywords.
What to expect after an SEO audit
Before you dive into conducting an SEO audit , you will want to know what to expect. Once an SEO audit has been conducted on your site, you will receive an audit report which is a final document outlining all of the issues with your current website.
This report will be analysed in order to identify low-hanging opportunities to improve your site in one of the five key areas. These areas include technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, competitor analysis and keyword research.
Using the data, SEO experts will interpret the raw data and suggest opportunities and strategies you can use to increase your overall traffic and visibility.
What is the difference between SEO analysis and an SEO audit?
SEO audits are long term processes in which you need to audit your entire site on-page, off-page, technical, user experience and other factors. It is the method of identifying your site’s fundamental issues which are affecting its performance and ranking.
SEO analysis however, observes all the factors above and determines how well you’re carrying out the site’s SEO strategy. It is almost impossible to make correct decisions in improving your site’s ranking in search engines without SEO analysis of your site.
In this guide, we’ll explain what a WordPress SEO audit is and why you need one, allowing business owners, directors, marketing managers and more to understand the necessary steps to optimising their website.
What is a WordPress SEO Audit?
If you have a WordPress website for your business, you will likely be aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Naturally, you may be wondering how you conduct a WordPress SEO audit.
A WordPress SEO Audit is the process of evaluating a website, hosted by WordPress, to determine its ability to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
It will also identify any flaws in your SEO strategy that could be negatively affecting your site’s performance. WordPress SEO audits also give you an insight into how well your site is able to generate organic traffic.
They present an opportunity to uncover issues, such as:
Technical aspects that prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site, such as poor architecture.
Duplicate or irrelevant content or broken links .
Slow loading times.
Problematic off-page elements ,such as low-quality backlinks.
The pros and cons of WordPress for SEO
Using WordPress does have its pros and cons when it comes to SEO that you should be aware of when deciding whether or not to use it for your site.
Pros of WordPress for SEO
User friendly CMS
WordPress is made for blogging, thanks to its strong content management system (CMS). It is extremely easy to manage and edit your content and makes it simple to organise without the need for knowledge on website management.
Plugins
There are over 50,000 plugins for WordPress users, with a range of both free and paid for. These plugins allow you to customise and enhance any WordPress site, and there are many plugins available to help optimise content, meta tags, keywords and much more. Having access to plugins like this ensures your website is SEO ready.
Responsive
WordPress has thousands of themes available which can help your sites become more responsive. How mobile friendly your site is plays a huge part in an SEO audit, since an increasing number of searches are conducted on a mobile device.
Cons of WordPress for SEO
Speed
Certain WordPress themes contain a lot of unnecessary code which can decrease the speed of the site and cause slow loading times. This can cause visitors to quickly bounce off your page, which can negatively affect how your page ranks on search engines.
Updates
Installing updates is important for the health of your website, but it can be a nuisance if it isn’t done thoughtfully. Updates can bring small problems to your site that could affect the way your site ranks on search engines.
SEO audit tools for a WordPress site
Most significant website issues that might negatively affect search rankings can be found and rectified with the assistance of reliable SEO audit tools.
Some of the best tools to use on your WordPress site include:
Google Search Console
SEMrush
Screaming Frog
Ahrefs
GTmetrix
What are WordPress SEO plugins?
Plugins can be both helpful and potentially harmful for your site. They make web page customisation easy, but they can also slow down your site if used improperly.
Listed below are a few popular plugins amongst WordPress users:
Yoast is a simple plugin that helps you to set-up meta tags and descriptions.
WP Rocket is a plugin used to optimise site speed.
Imagify is a popular plugin for image optimization.
WooCommerce is a plugin for e-commerce, turning any site into an online store.
Ninja Forms is a great plugin to create well maintained forms on your site.
Common SEO issues on a WordPress site
Too many plugins
WordPress by default is lacking in many features of SEO that professionals need at their disposal. Instead, you have to rely on plugins for basic SEO features, like Yoast.
The problem with having too many plugins on your site is that oftentimes, you will need more resources to be able to keep your site well maintained. When a plugin is updated, it can damage your entire website if it conflicts with another plugin.
Internal broken links
There is no easy way to detect broken links on a WordPress website without the use of another SEO plugin. To work around this issue, you will have to download a plugin to check for links or use tools like Screaming Frog.
Poor header tag setups
By default, your WordPress site’s theme may have poorly structured header tags. Your header tags (H1, H2, H3 and so on) are extremely important for readability.
You can change these tags by editing your theme, but you may need to have web dev experience or hire a developer to do this.
How often should I do an SEO audit on my WordPress site?
Just like any other website, regardless of if it is hosted on WordPress or not, you should be doing an SEO audit between two and four times a year.
If you are a smaller business with a small website, once every six months would be perfect. If you are a larger company, with new content being regularly uploaded every month, reviewing your site every quarter is more sensible.
If you have a relatively new website, or have never had an audit done before, then the first SEO audit you have is the most crucial.
How to perform an SEO audit on a WordPress site
There are various ways to perform an SEO audit for any website. You can go down the route of a manual audit or via an audit tool to accomplish the task.
If you choose to go down the manual route, here is a checklist for WordPress website audits:
Verify the programme and plugin versions
Check the sites speed
Review the content on your blogs
Verify WordPress’ security
Look for any broken links
Verify the functionality
Analyse your metrics
Review your SEO results.
SEO audits can be difficult to understand; that’s why the team at Tao Digital are here to help. We can perform a WordPress SEO audit for you and run through the key findings with you in order to plan the best next steps for your website.
How do I know if I need to audit my WordPress website?
There are a few different signs that your WordPress website will need an audit:
Your search rankings have fallen
You’ve launched a new site and want to check it is built correctly
Whether your site is new or old, is for a large business or an SME, we can conduct an SEO audit to help identify key issues and areas of improvement for your website to help its performance.
Get in touch with us today to plan your WordPress SEO audit and let us ensure that your website performs as best as it can.
The Different Types of Website Audits
Search engines are constantly evolving, and as a result of this, you should be actively ensuring that your website can keep up with these changes.
The best way to do this is by auditing your website, which helps to bridge the gap that affects your end-user experience and conversion rate.
What is a website audit?
A website audit often involves examining page performances prior to large-scale search engine optimisation (SEO) or site design.
Auditing your website can help to determine whether or not it’s best optimised to achieve your traffic goals, and can give you a sense of how you can improve it to reach these goals.
Audits are also often conducted after work on-site has been done. This helps to show progress, highlight under-appreciated areas and help to drive future online strategies.
Why are site audits important?
Site audits are important as they give a complete, detailed analysis into a website’s health, performance and speed.
Assessing these areas will give you full insight into the current effectiveness of your site. It will also show where you may be able to further optimise and/or improve your site, as well as identify issues that could be damaging to its health.
How different website audits are used
How a website audit is used for your own site will largely depend on your personal aims and objectives.
Here are the most common ways website audits are used:
Traffic analysis
With traffic analysis, we can look at where visitors are arriving from, where they came from, bounce back rates and other on-page engagement stats.
Based on the journey your visitors usually take, we can look at how your site’s design, content and functionality encourages conversion rates.
On-page optimisation
Your pages should be optimised with relevant and consistent keywords and your call-to-actions should be clear and compelling.
We will take a look at your content from a SEO perspective, looking for any potential unnecessary content or underdeveloped content to freshen up. Internal linking strategies may need to be formed to help users, and search engines, navigate your site efficiently.
Lead generation
We can audit your website to review the overall user experience and assess how well your website is optimised to generate leads. This involves taking a close look at lead generation mechanisms, such as call to actions and contact forms.
Here we will pinpoint obstacles your user faces when trying to engage with your site.
Social media
A social media audit involves looking at your organisation’s official social media accounts. This includes looking at the quality and quantity of your followers, who you’re following and the likes and shares of your most recent posts.
Taking a deeper look into your social media can help to define how your social presence impacts your website.
How do I know which audit I need for my website?
If you’re unsure which audit you need for your website, you should consider what goals you are looking to achieve by conducting an audit.
Consider:
What goals you are looking to achieve;
How many leads you are generating from your site currently and what you want to aim for;
Who your desired target audience is;
Current on-site and off-site issues, such as lack of call to actions, poor Core Web Vitals, struggling social platforms, underperforming content and so on.
From here, you should be able to have some sort of idea about the type of audit needed for your website.
If you’re still unsure, or you’re struggling to determine which audit is right for your site, an experienced search-marketing team, like us here at Tao Digital Marketing, will be able to help you. Our website auditing services are fully tailored to your website and needs.
Alternatively, get in touch with us if you think you’d benefit from some consultancy from our expert team.
Different types of website audits
A website audit is a full analysis of factors that impacts a site’s visibility on search engines, but a full website audit is not always necessary.
Listed below are some of the most common types of audits:
SEO Audit
An SEO audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or issues on a site that impacts organic performance. These problems must be addressed, otherwise they can prevent your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO audits include analysing components such as keywords, link profiles, image optimisation and goal conversions.
Technical Audit
A technical audit is simply just a type of SEO audit, but it focuses on the issues related to your website that happen behind the scenes.
Technical audits focus on the best practices for site visibility and ensuring all of the site meets all of the search engines requirements for crawling and indexing.
Content Audit
A content audit is the process of systematically assessing all of the content on your site. The main objective is to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and adapt your current content plan to align with your marketing goals.
It also includes delivering strong insights into what messaging and tone of voice is converting and what isn’t.
We can offer advice as to what content needs to be updated, whether some pages are harmful and need to be removed, deleted or no-indexed.
Competitor Audit
A competitor audit is used to track your competitors, understand their approach and figure out what their brand is doing which yours isn’t.
The aim is to discover what techniques and methods are used for other companies within your industry and incorporate these into your own strategy in the right ways.
Audits like these highlight how many keywords competitors are ranking for, how much content they have in comparison to your site and where they place against you in terms of traffic.
Link Audit
A link audit is the process of analysing links pointing at your site to find potential problems or opportunities. You need to find the links, establish which ones are potentially harmful and which are good, and then develop the right strategy to deal with them.
Social Media Audit
A social media audit is the process of reviewing how well social media is working for your business. This audit is the process of reviewing certain metrics to analyse your current social media strategy.
These metrics can include information on demographics, engagement, locations, campaign performance and more. An audit like this can involve impressions, shares, likes, comments and other interactions.
Conversion Rate Audit
A conversion rate audit (CRO audit) is a full assessment of a customer’s journey on your site. The purpose of the audit is to identify the technical and usability-related problems that could be damaging your website’s conversion rate.
A typical CRO audit will focus on analysing the end-to-end customer experience, as well as digging deeper into a website’s analytics.
Why should your business invest in website auditing?
Investing in on-site audits can be highly beneficial to your ongoing business strategy. Knowing where you currently stand in the ever-expanding online market, and strategizing on how to best improve this, is where your business can stand out.
Have a chat with our team about website auditing and how insightful they can really be.
Video for SEO in 2023: Predictions | Tao Digital Marketing
Video is becoming more prominent in search and will be a channel that needs to be part of a successful SEO campaign next year and beyond.
With Google Search Console recently adding it in as a separate section within the platform, we see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine.
We’ve already seen some of our own pages on the Tao Digital website start to rank higher once we embed a video, and we expect this will only continue. We’ve already included this in our marketing strategy for 2023 by planning accompanying videos to be included as part of our overall content strategy.
So, what do other agency owners and SEOs think? We decided to ask them and have rounded up their thoughts below!
Matt Tomkin, Our Founder and Director
Video is definitely going to help with a website’s overall organic search visibility. It’s important to optimise the description on Youtube along with adding the relevant schema markup to the web page it is published on.
By adding video to your content you are giving another option for visitors to digest your content and I think Google sees this as a user benefit.
Don’t let Google tell you they don’t use user metrics as a ranking factor! Why wouldn’t they? Give your visitor more ways to digest your content and you’ll be ahead of 99% of the other websites online.
The format is less important than the content. Your rankings won’t improve just because you’ve got a video on a landing page.
If, however, you can use that video to add value to the page (think video case studies, testimonials, research launch etc. – video needs to work for the part of the sales funnel the landing page is intended for) and that video is exclusive to that page (duplicate content is duplicate content) then it’s going to separate your landing page and content from the majority of your competitors’ webpages.
When it comes to Google Search Console adding video as a separate section, I’ve been following this closely. My prediction for the future of SEO/video content is that we’ll start to see fewer featured snippets in position 0, and instead, more videos. This makes sense because people are wanting videos instead of reading long-form content now.
In order for your business to benefit from this, I’d suggest creating videos for your most popular blogs. If you’re getting search volume for the blog, have a video for it too. If you’re in position 0, definitely have a video for it. Upload this to Youtube and make sure it’s also SEO-optimised. This way, whichever way Google decides to go, you’re covered.
I think Google will continue to develop ways of highlighting video content within search, especially for current and trending topics, with many people digesting information through the medium of video. We see this with the rise in popularity of TikTok which has spurred other social platforms to follow suit, such as Facebook and Instagram with Reels, and YouTube with Shorts.
Brands that do not utilise video marketing, whether it be in short form clips or longer-length videos, will be missing out on traffic potential, whether that’s from Google search directly or from social media.
Jamie Coles, Freelance Journalist, Press Officer and Video Producer
It’s really interesting that Google Search Console is adding video search to its platform. The importance for video search seems to be growing as we see video results bumped to the top of Google results.
From the point of view of SEO, I think we’ll all end up subtitling or transcribing our videos to improve the searchability of our videos thanks to the additional keywords. This will mean a rise of SRT (subtitle format) tools, which, as a video producer, I’d be grateful for.
We’ll also see a rise in AI transcribing tools and – hopefully – a bit of a step up in their accuracy because, right now, they’re more hassle than they’re worth. The positive side of these transcripts or subtitles is that they make videos more accessible.
We’ll also see a further trend in attention-grabbing thumbnails, probably with better optimised text as AI OCR tools begin recognising thumbnail text for search, too.
Beyond that we’ll likely see more video content better embedded higher up on a lot of web pages, and web pages better optimised for video embedding, as the Google search bots and results seem to be favouring video.
Conclusion
Although it’s impossible to predict the future, it is apparent that many SEOs are predicting similar themes – the power of video improving rankings, video being used to enhance existing content and transcription software developing further. These are likely to be key elements throughout 2023.
If you’re looking to use video as part of your SEO strategy, get in touch with us today.
Having a Google My Business Profile is a great way to get in front of new customers and help towards local SEO.
In this guide, we’ll be answering some of the most frequently asked questions about Google My Business, with step-by-step instructions for some of the more in-depth questions. Keep reading to find out more.
What is Google My Business?
Google My Business is essentially a business profile that appears on the side of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when someone searches for your businesses or your services in their area.
It’s essentially a brief overview of your business, including, but not limited to:
Business name
Address
Primary and secondary categories (your service offering – we’ll touch on this later)
Photos of the team/business/service offering
Location on Google Maps, sometimes an external shot of the business taken from Maps
Opening hours
Contact details
Website
Reviews
Q&A from users
Why is Google My Business important?
Google My Business is incredibly important – every business should have one as it helps potential new customers/clients find your business. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner and a local types ‘coffee shops near me’ into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These customers may never have come across you otherwise.
It also helps you to understand how your customers are finding/contacting you. Through looking at the analytics you can find out what keywords people search to find you, as well as getting insights on calls, reviews, bookings and more to understand how you connect with customers.
Does Google My Business help SEO?
Yes, it can help with SEO, particularly local SEO. Making sure your information is up to date and that you post regularly is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings (Google would never give away its true ranking factors or we’d all be fighting for number one).
It’s important to make sure you optimise your listing as much as possible – we’ll touch on this later.
Is Google My Business free?
Yes, Google My Business, or Google Business Profile, is completely free! The ultimate aim of Google is to make it easy to use and help people to find the local businesses they are looking for. By listing your business, you’re helping people looking for your services and of course, Google – hence why it’s completely free.
Interestingly, as we write this in November 2022, Google has filed a lawsuit against a company who allegedly charged people for setting up GMB profiles. According to Search Engine Land, the company “threatened business owners that if they failed to pay (typically $99), their Business listings would be deactivated or marked as “permanently closed” and their positive reviews would be hidden – resulting in lost visibility and revenue.”
Do I have a Google My Business account already?
If you’re buying out a business or starting out as a Marketing Exec, you may be wondering whether the business already has an account. The simple way to tell is to Google the business – if the profile comes up, the business has one. This will be a case of claiming the listing, which we’ll touch on later.
If not, it’s time to set your profile up.
How to set up Google My Business
Here is our simple guide
Google My Business is incredibly easy to set up. The first step is to go onto Google, make sure you are logged into a Gmail account (or a Gmail-connected email address) and click the dots in the top right corner. From there, you’ll find an option to click ‘Business Profile’.
Then, you’ll see the page below. Click ‘manage now’.
You will then be taken to the next page. As you’ll be setting up a brand new account, click ‘Add your business to Google’.
You can then enter your business name and business category. The frustrating part of adding a business category is that there is no drop down menu, instead you start typing and then can only pick from a selection available.
For us, we typed in ‘Digital Marketing’ and this didn’t appear, however ‘Marketing Agency’ did as you can see below – it’s a case of guessing the terms Google may file your business under until you find an exact or close match to how you would describe your business.
To help with this, Vicki Mace, Digital Marketing Consultant from Insight Digital Copy, advises that you look at what your competitors have as their primary category. Do a search for a primary keyword, see what businesses appear and identify what category they belong to.
She suggests that you can further validate this by asking the following questions:
Would this category be the best fit for the services/products you offer?
Do people search for this service? In comparison to other categories, how popular is it?
Further on in the process you can add up to nine other business categories. Be mindful only to add categories related to your business – Google will suspend anyone adding irrelevant categories just to show up for more terms.
After you have entered your category, you will then be asked if you want to add a location. If you are mobile or based at your home address, you may want to avoid this for security purposes and only give it when you receive an enquiry. In this instance, you are classed as a ‘Service Area Business’ (SAB).
If you click no, you will be taken to a page that allows you to list multiple service areas, as below.
If you click yes, you will be taken to a page where you can enter the address of your business premises. You will then be asked if you offer deliveries/home or office visits, as well as how far you are willing to go. This helps to extend your location reach. You can always change these at a later date too.
You will then be prompted to add your contact details.
In order to stop fake listings and to ‘help maintain the integrity of all profiles’, Google then has to verify that you own the business by giving you a code. They will ask whether you want to receive the code via email, phone call or by post, just select whichever is your preference. You will be asked to verify using more than one method most of the time.
If you don’t want to verify immediately or can’t get the access code immediately (e.g. if you’re a Marketing Exec and need a Manager to send you the code), you can select ‘Verify Later’ – your profile won’t be visible until you verify, but you can still progress with the listing in the meantime.
After this, you have the option to add secondary categories and your opening hours. You will also be asked if you want to accept messages through Google – you will be notified of any messages via email.
You will be prompted to add a business description, which can be 750 characters (not words) max. You can skip this step, however we highly recommend you add this as it will help for SEO purposes. Be sure to include keywords, including those listed as your primary and secondary categories, but avoid keyword stuffing. It has to look natural.
This also needs to be unique content in order to be effective. Avoid copying and pasting from your website.
Finally, you’ll be asked to add some photos to the listing. If you provide a service, Amy Toman, a Google Product Expert, recommends showing staff providing that service (e.g. if you’re a plumbing company, don’t show boilers, show a member of staff fixing one). She also suggests that cover images should show either a storefront or humans. Use as many unique photos as possible – they’re more indicative of a business than stock images.
After this, once you’ve verified the business with the code, your listing will be live.
If you ever want to change details in the future, such as your categories or address, simply go onto your Business Profile, click the edit pen and you should have the option to change your details.
Verifying your Business Profile by Post
In order to avoid new fake listings, Google will send a postcard with a code on it to your address. This will also happen if you have an existing listing but change the address to a different one. Simply wait for the postcard to arrive, let your team know to keep an eye out for it and enter the code once it has arrived to validate the listing.
If you’re a Service Area Business, Elizabeth Rule, Local SEO Analyst Sterling Sky & GBP Gold Product Expert, suggests verifying your GBP listing to the address your business is officially registered at. After you verify the GBP listing, you can clear the address field so the address is not visible to the public on maps or search.
How to verify your Google My Business location without a postcard
As great as verifying by postcard is in terms of avoiding spam listings, there are a couple of issues with this – it can take five to seven days to arrive, and also if it gets lost in the post or the wrong person receives it, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to request a second one.
If, for whatever reason, you are unable to verify your location without a postcard, there are several alternatives:
Phone call/email based on the contact details you provided when setting up your account. Be wary of having an automated answering machine on your phone line as this will be an automated call that cannot ‘press three to be connected to a member of the team’. You will be given a five digit code that you will need to enter into your GMB profile.
Connecting your Google Search Console account to your Google My Business account, which can give you permission to immediately verify the listing – however this may not work for all industries.
In some industries, you may be able to verify via a video call with Google themselves, or submit a video walkthrough of the business meeting Google’s specifications (e.g. show the storefront or other employees working with you).
If none of the above steps are available or fail to work, you can submit a ticket to Google and request for them to manually verify your account. You may be asked to send photos of the business along with other evidence.
How to Claim a Google My Business profile
two factors must be in place first
There are many reasons you may want to claim an existing Business Profile listing, for example if you’re buying a business out, or perhaps taking over from a previous marketing manager.
In order for you to claim a listing, two factors must be in place first:
The existing listing must already be verified by its current owner
The current owner must add you as a manager first (if they do not know how to do this, you can send them Google’s official guidance here)
There is a difference between managing and owning (claiming) a business profile. Both have slightly different levels of permissions. Below is official guidance from Google on the difference:
After being added as a manager
Once you have been added as a manager, it can take up to seven days to be given manager capabilities within GMB.
In order to claim the profile, Google the name of the business and you should see a button saying ‘Claim/Own this Business?’, or type it in here and click ‘Request Access’ then fill in the form. The current owner will be then notified and can grant you permission to claim/own the profile.
If the current owner doesn’t respond within three days, Google may give you the option to claim the profile yourself. In this instance, open the original email confirmation from Google stating that you requested access. Then follow the on screen instructions to verify.
How to edit Google My Business
You can only edit the Business Profile listing if you are a manager or owner. To edit, navigate to the top right of the page again on Google, click on your profile picture and click ‘Business Profile’. You will then see the name of your business and a pencil button, click this to edit.
You will then be taken to a page where you can edit every element of your business, from your name through to categories, description and contact information.
Can I change my Google My Business name?
Yes, you can. Just navigate to the editing page as above, click the pencil icon next to your name and change it.
How to optimise Google Business Profile
There are many ways to optimise your business profile. The main factor to bear in mind is to make sure you fill in as many details as you can and keep it updated constantly.
Other factors to bear in mind:
Photos: Add photos on a regular basis, especially of the team whenever you get updated headshots or team members join/leave. Add photos of any new service or product offerings, too. This helps to show consistency to Google which can help you to appear above other profiles who haven’t updated for quite a while.
Create regular posts: Senior SEO Manager Abby Leigh Curtis recommends that you should post whenever you have events to promote, offers/deals you want to advertise, featured products, business updates (e.g. new hours or services), or even blogs. You should always include high-quality images to accompany your posts.
However, one of the only downsides of Google Posts is that you can only choose from a dropdown for the CTA button:
Use a local phone number: This can help to further verify that you’re a local business and is an easy way to encourage customers to call you.
Add videos: Video is becoming increasingly important to Google, especially as they added video as a separate section within the Google Search Console platform. We see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine. Keep them under 30 seconds long to make sure that the file size isn’t too large.
Encourage reviews: Profiles with the most reviews tend to appear higher up when someone searches for your services. Ask your customers to give you reviews – this can really help you out (if they are positive, of course!).
Essentially, it’s all about keeping your profile up to date, giving as much information about your business as possible and keeping the positive reviews coming in.
How to Create a Post on Google Business Profile
In order to create a post on your Google Business Profile, simply make sure you’re logged in, Google the business name and scroll down a little. You should just see a large button allowing you to add a post.
Posts do have to be submitted manually, rather than scheduled – there is no way to schedule a post directly within Business Profile Manager, however there are various scheduling tools out there that can help with this.
How to rank higher on Google My Business
Ranking higher ties hand in hand with the optimisation tips we gave above. It’s all about keeping your information up to date, for example updating your hours during bank holidays or the festive period (Google often sends emails to prompt you to do this).
It’s also worth responding to your Google reviews and questions to show that you’re active, even if it’s just to say thank you.
Your website’s position in the SERP also determines how high up you will show in the listings, so general SEO for your website ties into this and is very important for more competitive search terms.
We like to use Brightlocal to help with building efforts. Brightlocal describe themselves as an ‘all-in-one local SEO, citations and reviews platform’. Within the software you can build citations (linking to your GBP) that can help with your rankings. Depending on the level of membership you have, it can also integrate with your social media profiles and Google Analytics.
My Google Business Profile got Suspended. What now?
Google may suspend Business Profiles that go against their guidelines. Breaching the guidelines includes, but is not limited to:
Promoting fraudulent or illegal activities
Low-quality content, e.g. misspelling or gibberish
Content containing swearing/offensive language
Focusing on special promotions, e.g. saying that everything is on sale or constantly saying that your products are 50% off
There are two types of suspensions: a soft suspension, where your listing is live but not verified (so you can’t manage and update it), and a hard suspension, where your listing doesn’t show up at all.
In October 2022 there was a major bug in the GBP system where hundreds of business owners had their Business Profiles suspended for no reason. Elizabeth Rule gives the following advice:
As we have seen recently with the suspension bug in GBP that there is not much, or anything, a business owner can do to prevent a suspension. There are things you can do to set yourself up for success to get the profile reinstated as quickly as possible if it does get suspended.
Here are some tips for Service Area Businesses to safeguard themselves in case they run into suspension issues:
Verify your service area GBP to an address you have business proof for. This proof can be utility bills in the business name, insurance certificates, business registration etc. You will need to have this proof if the profile is ever suspended or disabled. Even though your address is not visible, you need to provide proof to the address you verified the listing at to get reinstated.
Service Area Businesses should never use a virtual or shared space office to verify a listing. This is a clear violation of Google Guidelines as confirmed by Google in 2020.
Do not verify a GBP listing to an employee’s home. You may be able to get the listing live, but without valid business proof at the address you will never be able to get the listing reinstated if it gets suspended or disabled. Plus, if the employee ever leaves you have a listing verified to an address that you now have no connection to at all.
If you have multiple listings for the same business, make sure the service areas do not overlap. Even though the service area you add to the listing does not impact rankings, if you have two SAB listings with the same service area, Google considers this a violation of guidelines and one or both listings can be suspended.
Do not show your address if you are a pure Service Area Business. Even if the competition does or you think you can get away with it, if you ever need to contact support, they probably won’t help you if they notice you are an SAB with no signage that has the address showing.
Always make sure you have supporting documentation available in case of suspension; having it ready to submit with a reinstatement can cut down on the time your listing is offline.
Supporting documentation should provide a consistent story for the business (meaning the title and address, whether it shows or not). This could be insurance statements, a photo of the building with the logo of the business, your company registration number or similar. All should be from authoritative bodies, so usually not invoices.
Once you have submitted your evidence, it takes around three working days for Google to review and clear your request.
What are labels in Google My Business?
Labels in GBP are just for internal organisational purposes – outsiders can’t see them and they don’t help with rankings. They must be 50 characters or less.
The main reason you would use labels is if you have multiple different locations within GBP and want to quickly search for a profile. For example, if you’ve got coffee shops in Bolton, Manchester and Wigan all under the same name, you may want to just label them as these locations so that you can quickly search for them. It’s mainly for internal purposes.
How to add a Label into Google Business Profile
First, make sure you’re signed into Google, navigate to the Business Profile section and click ‘See Your Profile’. You’ll then be taken to the SERP with a summary of your profile. Click the three dots above the summary and select ‘Business Profile Settings’.
Then click ‘Advanced Settings’.
You can then add labels onto your profile.
How to delete a Google My Business listing
There are multiple reasons you may want to delete a Business Profile, for example if you are selling the business, rebranding, or perhaps the listing is an accidental duplicate. You can also leave the listing live but mark it as permanently closed.
It’s worth noting that the removal of a Business Profile is permanent. If you want to manage the profile again you’ll need to re-verify it again using the steps mentioned earlier on.
You don’t have to actually manage a business to remove it. Simply Google the name of your business/the business you want to remove, suggest an edit and click ‘Close or remove’, then follow the instructions on screen. This is where you would mark as permanently closed if the business is shutting down.
How to add Social Media to my Google My Business
There is no way to directly add your social media profiles to your Business Profile, however if they’re linked to on your website, Google may add them in this way.
If people are using the knowledge graph schema to add social profiles etc. on their websites this should pick up the social profiles much easier and show them in the “knowledge” panel for the brand/company. Rank Math’s helpful guide can assist you with this.
What are Attributes for Google My Business?
‘Attributes’ are various additional details that you can add to your profile in order to help potential customers further, for example detailing whether you offer outdoor dining or free WiFi. This can help you show up for more search terms, e.g. ‘Restaurants with free WiFi in Bolton’.
You can directly add these in, however many also come from your reviews, e.g. if your customers mention that you’re vegan friendly, this may appear as an attribute on your profile.
How to add Attributes to Google My Business
Navigate to Business Profile Manager and select Edit Profile, then Business Information. Select ‘More’ at the top.
Below is an example from one of our clients who owns a physical shop. You can see that they have detailed the sort of crowd that shops there, accessibility details, if the business is woman-owned, what sort of payments they accept etc.
Can you call the Google My Business team for support?
Google removed phone numbers from their support pages in 2019, so unfortunately there’s no way to call them directly now.
For support queries it’s best to go directly through their support page. From there you can select which profile you need help with, what the issue is and your contact options.
